Author’s Note: This story has a revolving point of view; it rotates between Thurston’s point of view and a new character, Natsumi’s point of view. Since last chapter was Thurston’s point of view, this chapter will be in Natsumi’s point of view. It will continue in that cycle for the most part.

Chapter 2: Drown My Nightmare, Part 1

“Natsumi…”

My obnoxiously blaring alarm went off suddenly. My hand slithered over to the desk that it rested on and felt around for the snooze button. I groaned a little bit, still half asleep. My fingers finally found their destination and I gently pressed into the snooze button. However, it was no use.

“Natsumi! Don’t hit that snooze button! Get out of bed, young lady!”

I groaned more at my mother’s command. Groggily, I rolled out of bed and staggered to my feet with the dizziness that always comes right after getting up. I glanced around like things would be different somehow. However, my room was exactly the same as it was a few hours ago when I managed to get to sleep. My clothes lay in every corner of my small room. Various framed photos of me and my mother or me and my closest friends decorated my otherwise messy dresser. Multi colored belts hung from a small wooden rack in my corner with a sign above them that read “Hapkido belts.” My plain white walls still had clumped paint splattered across them, and my carpet remained its dull gray color. Perfect. My senses came back to me gradually and I headed for the small bathroom in the hall. My house was pretty normal for the year 2030; we had the standard automated cleaning machines, thin-as-paper TV monitors, and automated security systems. Believe it or not, we weren’t very wealthy; my family was lower middle class, really.

“Natsumi!” My mother called up again and this time started prattling off in Japanese. I only rolled my eyes in annoyance. She always started going off in Japanese whenever she got upset. I guess even though EVOL had denied her culture outdoors, she still managed to hang onto it indoors.

“Mom, stop speaking Japanese! We’re not supposed to!” I yelled down at her from the top of the stairs.

As she got angrier, her speaking got faster, so much so that I couldn’t even understand her anymore. I caught the name EVOL, followed by a string of swears, before she finally stormed off into the kitchen to take out her frustration on her breakfast.

“What am I going to do with her?” I sighed deeply to myself as I gently opened up the door to the bathroom. I stared at my reflection in the mirror for a little bit, as usual. I was the same seventeen year old Japanese girl I was the day before; my long black hair hung down to my elbows and my oddly large brown eyes stared back at me. I quickly got undressed and stepped into the shower.

As I cleaned myself under the hot, steamy stream of water, I remembered high school. Those times seemed like distant memories at that time, even though I had only graduated a few months ago. It had always been my dream to graduate and attend college to become a doctor. Even as a child, I carried around a pretend stethoscope and would press it against my friends. If memories of high school were distant, then memories of childhood were ancient history.

Once I was finished getting cleaned up and dressed, I bounded down the stairs. My mother was approaching me across the wooden floor of our humble abode. I felt a little bad about yelling at her about restrictions regarding language so I prepared a thoughtful apology. However, she beat me to the punch.

“I’m sorry, Natsumi.” She looked on at me pitifully. As I looked back at her, it was one of the first times that I had noticed that my mother was not the same young woman that she used to be. Her pitiful expression enhanced by her slightly wrinkling skin almost made me want to weep; she resembled a broken woman who was aging ungracefully. She brushed a few strands of her black hair from her brown eyes.

“You were right, honey. I shouldn’t speak Japanese anymore. Anyone could hear me.”

My rising emotions kept that heartfelt apology from ever coming out.

“Its fine, mom. Don’t worry about it.” I turned towards the door desperately, but she stopped me by placing a hand on my shoulder.

“No, it’s not. I know…” She trailed off sadly for a moment.

“…I know that you’re upset about not being able to go to college, but…”

I spun around on my heel with an upset face. Whenever she brought up our situation, it deeply struck a nerve within me. “I said that it’s fine, mom! I don’t care at all that you’re a single mom barely making rent and that I have to get a full time job to support us!”

I stormed out the door, nearly crying, and started down the path in front of our house. I could hear my mother crying out my name for me to come back in the distance, but I ignored it and continued down our dirt path and turned on to the sidewalk. It was early, but I headed in the direction of my dull job. Anything to get out of the house at that particular moment.

“Damn it all…” I swore under my breath as I clenched my fists tightly. Thankfully, my nails were cut down short; otherwise I probably would have drawn blood from my hands.

I looked around intensely at the scene around me. City life in New Tokyo was at best, awful. Thefts and murders were as common as anything. Pollution was terrible and filled up your lungs in the worst way, not that there was a pleasant way to be gagged by filthy air pollution. My mother used to always tell me stories about the original Tokyo in the mainland, and how wonderful everything was before EVOL. I could only laugh at those stories, as nothing even remotely pleasant could compare to the hellhole that I was unfairly placed in.

The scene around me at this moment in question, though, was relatively tame. Not many crooks or shady people appeared to be slithering in and out of the alleyways. It may seem strange to fear criminal activity early in the morning, but in New Tokyo, it was a harsh reality. I heard so many stories from my mother about the glorious mainland (which was where she was from), but I couldn’t imagine it being any different. 2030 was an intensely depressing year to have the misfortune of barely living through, on the island of Chikara, on the main island of Japan, or anywhere else in the world; that was for sure.

However, as I continued down the street, something caught my eye; an arrest of a boy about my age. To this very day that I tell this story, I don’t know why I ever even looked over at the scene in question. Lots of people got arrested by the cops around there. But for a reason that I’ll most likely never know, I turned in the direction of the cop car in front of the strange boy.

“He’s probably a drug dealer or something…” I scoffed at the young man in my head. I got a little closer and slowed down my walk so that I could “accidentally” eavesdrop on what was happening.

“What the hell were you doing laying in the middle of the sidewalk, boy?!” One of the two cops emerged from the car desperately demanding an answer from the young man.

The black haired boy said nothing and wore a horrified expression as the police men closed in on him.

“Looks like they’re going in for the arrest… And the guy looks like he already knows that he’s caught.”

“Say something, boy! We’ve got a lot of other hooligans to catch today, you know!” The other officer shouted.

“I’m not a hooligan…” The boy breathed, regaining his confidence slowly. He eyed all of his surroundings carefully and took a long, deep breath through his nose which he exhaled through his mouth.

Right at this moment, the first bomb went off.

A massive burst of fire and noise overtook my senses like a tsunami engulfing everything in its path. My hands instantly flew to my ears in a desperate attempt to save my hearing. Somewhere along the way, I fell onto my backside. It throbbed a little, but I was far to frightened to notice. Smoke gagged my nostrils and windpipe like someone was strangling me and plugging my sinuses at the same time. Gasping for air, I looked up to see that the police car was the target. My eyes flashed back and forth rapidly and various shady looking people came out of hiding. I had no idea where they had come from, but it suddenly made sense why there weren’t any criminals out today. The scene suddenly became one of absolute chaos.

“Down with EVOL!” They chanted wildly without any sort of restraint. Some of them were shouting in Japanese. The few hooligans turned into many, and soon, gunfire went off. My routine walk to work had turned into a regular gang war. I glanced over to the flaming cop car and saw that the two officers were still alive. The hooligans surrounded them, kicking and bludgeoning them mercilessly. It was difficult to feel sorry for them; I was too concerned for my own life. I searched around for the boy, but he was nowhere to be seen. I tried to get up and run away, but my legs disobeyed me. I thought that my life was over at that moment; fear consumed every fiber of my body and I looked around helplessly like a child. However, I felt a sudden pull on my arm. I desperately searched for who grabbed a hold of me, but no one was near me. I felt a freezing cold chill shoot down my spine that seemed to jolt in all different directions at the same time.

“Come on, we have to go!” A bodiless voice called out to me.

“What… What’s going on?!” I cried, horrified by this point.

“We have to get out of here!” For a disembodied voice, he was persistent.

”Who or what are you…?” I was trembling violently and couldn’t feel my legs.

“Just come on!” The voice got more demanding and I was pulled up onto my feet by what seemed like a ghost. The situation in general put my mind in such a distorted condition that I obliged to the voices demands. With the mysterious pull on my arm, I sprinted as fast as I could down the sidewalk, smashing through the massive crowd that had formed. I pressed against various sweaty bodies that expelled pure heat in an attempt to penetrate through the huddled mass of criminal flesh. I still felt the pulling on my arm the whole time, as if something, or someone, was leading me out. As I was pulled out, I noticed that each of the people that I bumped into gave me a horrified, perplexed look. I didn’t think much of it then. I peered up into the skies to see a police chopper speeding in circles around the giant mob. It looked like they were about to gas everyone, as there was a large canister underneath the blue and black chopper. They shouted some warning that I couldn’t quite comprehend over all of the noise.

When I, possibly, “we,” got out of the giant crowd, the pulling on my arm led me behind a building. It was filthy looking, like most of the alleys in New Tokyo, complete with a foul stench and an overflowing dumpster. But as long as we were out of the range of the gas, I was content. I could hear the distant cries of the mob as pepper spray must have soaked deep into their pupils and down their dry throats. I looked both curiously and fearfully in the direction where I was being pulled. However, something caught my eye. In my peripheral vision, I saw the dirty gravel ground. But I only saw the ground. I felt my emotions rising up, waiting to explode as I realized that my feet and legs were gone from sight. The lava that was my horrified emotion slowly came to the surface and erupted not long after.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!”

I was barely even able to scream for five seconds before I felt a hand or something of the sort fly over my mouth.

“Shh!! Quiet down!”

I nodded and gathered myself gradually. I felt the hand move from my lips after awhile. As soon as the hand ceased coming in contact with me, I felt the cool chill leave my body and my warmth returning. I frantically looked back down at my body and saw that it had returned to sight. I sighed and fell back in relief like weights had just been taken off of my shoulders. However, it seemed like the same thing was happening to whatever was in front of me. The sight of the same boy who was being questioned by the police slowly faded into view. I released a small gasp from my lips as the black haired boy in the brown jacket from before suddenly stood before me where thin air had been. My concept of logic and reasoning had just been blown to pieces in one fell swoop. Good Lord.

“What… the hell?!” I cried. “What is going on here…?”

The boy looked at me fearfully before taking off running without saying a word.

“Come back!” I suddenly shouted. This boy had just shattered my concept of what was possible and what was impossible; I had to know what I had just witnessed. My legs agreed with me and I took off after the speedy teen ahead. As we got closer to the exit of the alley, I noticed that he was slowing down and that I was gaining ground. Something had to be wrong as he seemed to be impossibly fast just a minute ago. It sort of looked like he grabbed a hold of his head for a moment, before promptly falling over, unconscious. Almost fearful for him, I ran over to the slumped body of the black haired boy and kneeled down before him. At this moment, something absolute came over me and my entire psyche. It was as if invisible strings were tied around my arms and legs, dragging me over to the strange boy ahead of me.

And those strings of fate crossed my path with one that would alter life as I knew it forever.